I've been programming a while (my first program was on paper tape, in Dartmouth Basic....), and in several languages: Fortran (and FORTRAN, before it had a character variable type), IITRAN (now you can find out where I went to college), Perl, awk, VBScript, C, JavaScript, SQL, JCL, CLISTS, etc.

They're tools, in the same sense as an oscilliscope or a hammer. Some tools are better for some tasks than others. Fortran is really good at numerical programming (especially if you leverage netlib 8-) ), so it would make sense to write a numerically intense program in Fortran (see, for example, http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/bbh/ and http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/atm-cam/docs/cam3.0/cam30eul-browser/index.html ) but less so to write a program to filter log files or perform source code control. I find perl much easier to use than bat files (I'm working on Windows) or VBScript to interact with users and the file system; I've just written a nice little GUI in perl (using the Tk module) to manage a build system. I'd never used Tk before; it took me about 2 days, with frames, listboxes, checkboxes, radiobuttons, etc. Certainly, it is not elegant, but it is serviceable. Much easier than trying to do it in C++ or VB.